Topic: Marxism theory Suddenly making sense (Read 509 times)

Yes, corruption is a fundamental problem. Systems of governance that make corruption easy are more likely to fail - this is a part of what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe. In theory, democracies are least prone to corruption... but the problem with capitalist democracies is that the term is an oxymoron. If it's capitalist, then it's plutocratic rather than democratic - whether intentionally or not, if the aim is to increase your money, then those who already have money start at an advantage, and over generations can come to control everything, not least the media, which they can then use to increase their advantage. Rising inequality is a feature of capitalist democracies, not a bug. I would argue that beyond a certain point it becomes both unsustainable and morally indefensible.

I was joking with my wife about corruption. Apart from corruption is an act that is not commendable and violates moral values and religion and harms the people. The habit of corruptors, especially large corruptors after committing corruption is to diverge their money at home and abroad so as not to be tracked. However, if corruptors spend all of their money from corruption to dissipate domestically, the money will rotate economically and the economy will move.

The amount of money corrupted by some corruptors is fantastic. One middle-ranking tax employee in my country committed corruption of USD 118,000,000.

This is an irony of life. This kind of situation and position wasn't brought in by the Marxist ideology but it is across all social-economic agenda, be it Communist etc. Also, it is there in the developed countries that people who are wealthy can provide more better things for themselves and class is present too ; also in poor nations.


All things are equal in every country  


I think a society that wants to succeed should look for how to go down on corruption. Corruption eats down the fabric of all structure.

To be honest, it quite easy to fix poverty issue in a short time, without creating other problems, and not necessarily through Marxist idea,  (which I don't fully understand yet).
Maybe using unique solutions to your own peculiar problem is a better way of solving the problems. Especially if people with different agenda won't frustrate you deliberately and consistently.

 I don't really believe in paying people more money than is required, so that they can buy whatever they like. What's important in my opinion is that everyone can afford the basic things (good/healthy things) of life to survive.
Many poor people are not lazy. They work really hard and produce good things yet are poor. There are several reasons why they would choose to remain poor which I don't want to go into.
The best/good producers among poor could be incentived to expand and produce more good things. Those who are not so good yet, could even work under the best/good ones. Government or society can guaranteed them healthy life by getting them paid special money they can only use for the basics things. You could even design the money to be used mostly for buying things from those they work under. The extra money they earn from working hard can then be used for extra/non-basic things.

Never underestimate any theory that tells you that there is a method that makes sense completely while leaving out everything else.

Unfortunately in our world there are all kinds of people and no system would be fit for everyone. I may understand that you may want to live in a world where racist people do not exist for example, or at least the world moves on to anti-racist laws whereas racist people are hated and disregarded and not cared about, that makes sense right?

Racist people are sick and horrible, yet the thing is, even when you do that which is right, they will get together and eventually that pumped up rage for "not being allowed to be a racist" would make them elect someone like Trump. So believe me, there is no one right method even if you want the best of the world.

It depends. Voluntary can still be exploitative. An employer wants someone for a day's hard labour. He finds an illegal immigrant who is willing to do the work for a crust of bread. It's still a voluntary exchange, the employee has agreed to do the work for the stated reward. This is admittedly an extreme example to illustrate the point. But can we still say it's voluntary? The worker needs the job in order to survive. The employer knows this, and offers the minimum that he thinks the worker will accept.

I appreciate that there are honest employers who want to pay a fair wage, but equally there are exploitative employers. A minimum wage works to prevent exploitation. If a job needs doing, then I'm not sure we can say that the minimum wage will prevent the company from hiring someone, if there are executives on high salaries. I appreciate that for a small company with only a couple of employees, which is trying to expand, this may be different.

I think I might be diverting this from being an economic discussion to a moral discussion, so apologies for that.

Disagreement makes life interesting

The above assumption might not true. At least for honest employers who learn business 101.
If the employer can afford $5/hour, he would pick the best candidate at $5/hour.
If the employer can afford $4/hour, he would pick the best candidate at $4/hour.
The minimum wage will put the burden to businesses that can only afford less than $5/hour.

Well, that's a market mechanism, but as long as the exchange is voluntary, then why we want to restrict that decision? Is it morally correct to forbid voluntary exchange between employer and employee?

Unemployment will always exist because not all man is equal in term of skills. Some might have low enough IQ which makes them impossible to train/educate.

Anyways, if what shapes your view about this issue is related to sweatshops in Asia (*cough* China) or Africa, perhaps not all sweatshops are identical in terms of honesty. Some use force (backed by the regime) and fraud, thus the exchange is no longer voluntary. Moreover, some argue without sweatshops, the people there will suffer more.

It's important to view both sides of the argument, I could create an alt account (marxist) and argue with myself lol.

I disagree with a lot of your arguments there, but I appreciate you taking the time to argue it point by point. Not everyone does that. I think our differing perspectives can perhaps be distilled to the quote below.

In a society where there is unemployment, there are more people than there are jobs. For simplicity and as it relates to the question of minimum wage, we are talking here about low-skilled low-pay jobs. This means that the bargaining power is entirely with the employers. Say there are a hundred people and one job. If there is a minimum wage, then the employer has to pay say $5 per hour to whoever gets the job. The person who gets the job is the one who is judged to be the best applicant. Whereas in the absence of a minimum wage, the employer gives the job to whoever is willing to work for the least pay. If a hundred people are applying for that $5 job, then the employer can drop the pay to say $3 and still get twenty applicants. Maybe someone will do it for $2. What is happening is that the employer is exploiting the fact that there are surplus workers, and instead of paying a fair or living wage, they are paying the minimum that someone will do it for.

I suppose in part this comes to the question of what is the ethical thing to do, and there is no absolute right or wrong here, merely differences in judgement about what level of inequality is justifiable or desirable. But the question of whether markets need governments to rein in their excesses was answered in 2008 - albeit with the bailout money going to, in my opinion, the wrong people.

In the modern era (for non-authoritarian regime countries), this is incorrect assumption because workers need hygiene in order to perform. Since no slave allowed, employers must pay "enough" so employees can work properly. Moreover, the market will determine whether the payment is acceptable or not and workers are free to choose their job.

The view about the capitalists are bad, is Marxist.

Nowadays, business owners understand if they want to build sustainable business, they have to treat their workers humanely.

I'd argue the illegal immigrants are paid below equilibrium point, because more bargaining power for employers. If there is no minimum wage and the workers are legal, it's going to be at the equilibrium.

By putting barrier, a lesser number of unemployed will get the job. Perhaps someone somewhere cannot get a job (and cannot acquire new skills) at the moment because of this barrier.

Minimum wage is only applicable for low-skill jobs, if a worker has a high-skill job, he will earn more than the minimum wage anyway. We live in a world that values skill, and not sweats and tears. Therefore, this minimum wage will only price out young labors who have no real skill and no real work experience.

Because wages are sticky instead of reducing wage, you will find the unemployment rate increases in any recession. The more skilled the worker, the more he becomes irreplaceable.

Based on your logic, why not removing the minimum wage and employ 200 people at $5k per annum? +100 for job training, -100 for potential criminals.

Like I said mate, we need to rethink the assumption of "removing minimum wage thus the management will earn more."

Both workers and capital owners need each other. Capitalists will simply get out of the country and invest somewhere else if they see the costs/risks are too high to do business, in other words, capital flight.

Yes. Disparity in inherited wealth (and in passive income derived from inherited wealth) is a bigger driver of inequality than is disparity in earned income.

I would argue that if you have no minimum wage, then in a system that has unemployment, this will allow employers to drive wages down. An employer in general has zero interest in the standard of living of his employees, rather they just want to get a job done for the lowest cost possible. This is why illegal immigrants are paid below the minimum wage - because there is no barrier to prevent employers from doing so. So long as there is unemployment, the power is with the employers. The converse is only true in specific circumstances such as working-age population depletion after a war.
Secondly, if a minimum wage is in place, then for a company to reduce wage costs they will have to look at reducing the wages of those higher up the chain, which helps to reduce inequality. I don't think they would achieve this by reducing headcount of the lowest paid employees, as in most (all?) industries these are the indispensable people who are actually doing the job, rather than those managing them and working at a level of abstraction.
Thirdly, from the perspective of the wider economy it is healthier to employee 100 people at $10k per annum than it is to employ 1 person at $1m per annum - because rich people tend to hoard their wealth, whereas poor people spend it and keep it circulating.

... as for the overall question of Marxism, I think it will lose relevance. A key premise is that the proletariat have a huge bargaining chip in that the employers need their labour. But in modern society we are seeing huge and ever-increasing automation, and it is likely that the 'working class' will soon become an anachronism. To bring cryptocurrencies into it, smart contract platforms such as Ethereum offer the possibility of automating whole swathes of white-collar professions (mortgage broker being an oft-cited example). I believe that as this continues we will see more of a clamour for the introduction of a UBI.

To be honest, this is one of the greatest thread i ever read in this section. I am not a marxist but i did always believe in the developed reason of this theory.
However, marx insist in the necessity of the interfer of the government to elaborate the mecanisms of production in the society. But, with the blockchain technology, some principles in the marxcism should be revised, as individuals can take responsability of their own lives without the need of the interfer of any other additional part.

It is very difficult to eliminate differences in the economy, no matter how well the government regulates the economy. There will always be rich
and poor people, because everyone is different in character and luck. So for those who are hard working, diligent, smart and also lucky, it will
definitely be easy becomes rich. Then the rest will certainly be poor, that is the law of nature. And it keeps happening, and no one can fix it.
So from that we ourselves must choose which one we want to be, if we want to become rich people we must be willing to work hard, work smart
and never give up. If you are lucky it can be achieved in a relatively short time.

Any collectivistic doctrine is doomed to fail, for it contravenes the mere human nature. People are egoistic, which is justified by the law of the evolution. Without proper incentives, a collectivistic society cannot reach full productivity and loses to more efficient models.


You have just invented a progressive tax system.


Nice, a business owner in your village counts a new payroll and concludes that the business is not profitable now, so he:

a) drastically raises prices if the business is locally oriented;

b) shuts down all his operations and moves to a region that provides most marginal efficiency in the other case.

Now instead of people who get smaller wages we have a bunch of unemployed. This can only work properly with public institutions.


How are you going to force employers to follow it? There are many anti-discrimination rules that simply don’t work until you set hard quotas.

Marxism is a political doctrine based on the philosophy of materialism. With the orientation of egalitarianism and populism collectivism which is the teaching of Marxism, is absorbed by Marxism-Leninism by removing the legal rights of individuals who are citizens of society. The collapse of the monolithic soviets actually encouraged the development of Marxism apart from Stalinism and became a new school of thought and action that was creative and pluralistic.

The development of Marxism was certainly caused by a high gap between ideality and social reality where poverty and hunger and natural destruction widened, exploitative capitalist power structures and led to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few people making the reality of oppression real, rooted in an economic and political appetite.

The structural approach will lead to an awareness of the importance of analyzing class struggle to establish a truly just society structure. In addition, a pragmatic approach to marxism will remain relevant given the development of capitalism is very crucial, which requires us, to keep sanity so that it is not easy to be moved to superficial issues that are not substantial. This certainly needs to be supported by placing human values as the foundation with Marxism as the method of analysis while the class struggle as a method of struggle.

While this thread is about marxism, I wasn't only talking about it, because all radical movements are on the rise right now. Far right are getting more support in the US and Europe, which partly can be explained as a reaction to immigration, but that's not all. Mainstream social media really help this radicalism to grow, reddit and twitter have very vocal far-left userbase, Facebook and Youtube's algorithms will bombard anyone who looked at something political with more content from the same political camp. It's very easy join these radical ideologies if all you have to do is just use popular social media platforms - previously you had to find the ideology, now the ideology finds you.


It's just like I said, it's only true for the West, because they don't have a grandma to tell them how it was, so the public opinion can change, especially in the age of social media. Eastern Europe sure isn't warming up to marxism right now.

the internet made radical politics more accessible but i suspect wage stagnation, falling living standards, and the general realization that ordinary people growing up today will never own a home, has more to do with it. we've been on a grim trajectory for many years now---long before the coronavirus pandemic, which is just an accelerant.

my read on generation z is they are much closer to political radicalization than millennials, who are still clinging to their tiny house dreams and robinhood accounts. they more so see the writing on the wall, and they lack the political idealism that rallied millennials behind politicians like obama. i see them becoming increasingly leftist (whereas obama-ites were very centrist) and apolitical in the mainstream sense of electoral politics.


people are also becoming less and less fooled by the conflation of "socialism" or "communism" with the USSR. marxism-leninism and certainly stalinism and maoism are widely viewed on the left as extreme perversions of marxism. and marxism is certainly not the totality of socialist thought either, even if its economic theories have been influential.

There is no really a perfect government system even china had made a huge leap when it comes to economic growth as a communist country. Their huge population and prodictivity brought china into this economic progress as I assume. Their workforce receiving low salary or just enough to make a living or nothing at all since they are provided by their government make sense on why the china products were relatively cheap.

The maxirsm theory on which OP had mention relatively is all about conflict theory on the capitalist and the worker. Karl Marx had pointed out that it could result to revolution to overturn overturn capitalism to which it could be change to communism of government form.

I am not in favor of communism nor the capitalism. Everyone should have the favor to access or has the freedom to get and workout what one wanted like a good house which in communism coulr not be done and property with high value might be confiscated.

In capitalist way of life also will be difficult to the poor since the rich will become richer and poorer will become poorer. The Capitalist compete each other to take the spot on the richest or the largest asset they could have. They do not understand the value of humanity that instead of sharing, they let their employee to starve by giving them low salary.

Personally I am against when someone doesn't work and gets rewarded. That makes people lazy and loafer. Instead, we have to provide higher education for people and reward system for them. Let's make it happen for everyone to get high quality education in every school and those who will succeed the most, give ability to learn in one of the greatest universities like Oxford, Cambridge and so on.
But no, they won't do it because Governments need uneducated and poor people, it's easier to manage them. When a person hasn't seen a good life, he/she doesn't crave it and is satisfied with the live that they have. That's beneficial for governments, they'll tell you some lies like we will make electricity cheap if you vote us and so on. Higher percentage of people fell into this lie. Did one government broke their promise? No problem, these people will have a hope for another one and it goes endlessly.

Some people have trillions of USD and then they tell us: Oh man, it's bad to print money cause it causes inflation. Then give us your money if you really care on us.

Do billionaires try to help poor people? Yes? Then how are they billionaires? And again, hunger isn't an infection to get affected by it, so they just don't care on poor people but when corona virus came here, they suggest us: Buy face masks, stay (without money) at home to make me feel secure and unaffected by virus, to protect my health.
Sounds hilarious, right? But truth!

What actually happened is that with the development of the Internet, it became easier to reach people, so radicals of all sorts, including marxists, are able to spread their propaganda without problems, while in the past newspapers and tv channels could simply refuse to host them.

Another reason why it's on the rise is because the US and Western Europe have never experienced communism, so a lot of their people think that it's a good idea, due to the "the grass is greener on the other side" effect.

I wouldn't want to live in a country that practise Marxism in that case.

This is the reason why water supply and energy supply has to be owned by the government not from private entity for profit. If the capitalist won't be able to provide it for free in times like this then the government can intervene because there is no job and income for which the working class will be able to pay for their bills. If its not going to be done its only a matter of time that the people who without electricity to light their homes will revolt. Chaos will inevitable in times like this pandemic.